The writedown comes after HP discovered what it says was “a willful effort on behalf of certain former Autonomy employees to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company in order to mislead investors and potential buyers.”

So how does such an effort — clearly a big one, given the size of the writedown — manage to go undetected in the diligence phase of a $10 billion deal? One reason, Autonomy would have you believe, is that companies are not using the kind of world-class data management systems on offer from companies like….Autonomy.

This year the market witnessed the dramatic and devastating impact of high-profile fraud cases. World-class financial institutions putting back the pieces of their organizations are asking themselves, “How can one trader, one market segment, expose us to such enormous risk? Why didn’t our risk management controls work?” In retrospect, the answer seems obvious: information silos, a lack of integrated governance processes and alert mechanisms across systems and departments created corporate blind spots. Senior management had no immediate visibility into the scope or depth of the risk.

Sounds terrifying! What is a would-be acquirer of a large company, trying to identify such “enormous risk,” to do? We’ll tell you, after the jump.